created and performed by Bundon Pfeifer Henderson

Peter Tripp, a once-celebrated radio DJ, performed a publicity stunt in 1959 wherein he broadcast continuously, for 201 hours, from a glass booth in Times Square. This act was his undoing—he suffered psychological complications from prolonged sleep deprivation, and his increased fame made him a target for investigators who would indict him for commercial bribery in the “payola” scandal of 1960. 

Untitled Peter Tripp Project is a physical and poetic interpretation of Tripp’s dilemma, created by artists Johanna Bundon, Jayden Pfeifer, and Lee Henderson, and performed by this trio and artist Tess Degenstein. This work highlights the natural interdisciplinarity of performance by composing an atmosphere that activates space, breath, gesture, voice, light, and sound with equal importance. Endurance-based movement, improvisational and written text, image projection, radio frequency programming, and the fracturing/looping of sound recordings conjure hallucination, fugue states, and doppelgånger-paranoia. The work is imaginative and sensation-rich, and aspires to affect the collective nervous system of its audience through the performers’ embodiment of these heightened states of presence. 

This ensemble of artists moves fluidly between the roles of performer and technician, activating the performance space for one another. They work in relay to create the images and performance actions, handing off the metaphorical baton to keep the momentum of both the technical aspects and performative actions. And, they enter the arena of Tripp’s myth to research their personal relationships to themes of exhaustion, public failure, and loneliness.